Bill Christophersen: “My native Bronx burned down in the ’70s, beginning about the time I moved to Manhattan (1971). Every summer night in 1976, 1977, the fire engine sirens would begin about sundown—I’d hear them and see the smoke across the Harlem River. Before the decade was out, much of the borough I and my classmates had grown up in looked like post-World War II Dresden. Packs of wild dogs roamed the streets of Hunts Point. Morrisania and Mott Haven were, except for the housing projects, mostly rubble lots and the shells of charred tenements. This history has little to do with my poem ‘Neighbor’ but much to do with who I am and what I write.”